Ball the Jack

Hi, you have A Way with Words. Yes, hi, my name is David and I’m calling from Tallahassee, Florida.

Hey, David, welcome. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I’m calling with a question about a turn of phrase. It’s a particular turn of phrase that my father always used and it was used in a context of speed and when someone would come past you in a hurry, he would say that person is really bawling the jack and I’m just curious to know if you’ve ever run across us. Balling the Jack.

So this means they’re like going super fast?

Exactly.

So if you were on the road and someone went past you in a hurry, he would look at that person and say, wow, they’re really balling the Jack. And I’ve never had any idea what the reference was to.

You can puzzle it out from context, but I don’t know what the meaning of it was. Did he work in railroads, perhaps?

He didn’t. He married into a railroading family, though.

Interesting. Well, it’s now historical, not much used, but there was a time in the early part of the 1900s, 1913 to be exact, where to ball the jack or balling the jack was a dance. There was a big craze in the African-American community for doing this particular kind of dance. And I don’t know exactly what the moves were, but apparently it involved a lot of energy.

And not long after that, the term starts to pop up all over America in a variety of contexts that have nothing to do with dancing, but almost always meaning to hurry or to be frenetic, and sometimes meaning to take a risk or do something stupid. And in railroading, the term stuck there and became to refer to, there’s a number of different uses, but the main one seems to be almost the equivalent of highballing something, which is to tell a train to go ahead, to signal that it’s all clear and they can go.

Although sometimes there’s a connotation there if you tell a train that can ball the jack, they’re saying go ahead as fast as you want, even though it’s risky.

So is high ball connected to balling jack?

No, there’s no connection, even though some people have falsely made that connection. But we’re certain it comes from the dance and it was borrowed into railroading, although the railroading people get a little shirty about this and insist that it started in railroading. But the written record is very clear that it existed far earlier in the African-American community as a dance before it ever appeared in railroading.

That’s fascinating.

I really appreciate that you could shed some light on it. My father is up in his 70s now, and he has dementia, and I’m not able to go back and ask him where he first heard that term. And I’ve never heard anyone else in our family use it before, but he used it so regularly I figured he must be drawing on a lot of experience with it from somewhere.

So that is absolutely fascinating. The other one that I had thought might be a possibility is the game of Jack’s, knowing that it had a ball and required you to move quickly. But I was far afield, so thank you for clarifying that for me.

Yeah, sure. We’re not 100% sure what the bawling means here or the jack. The written record shows that there’s no sexual connotation whatsoever, though it would be easy with modern ears and eyes to misread that slang.

Yeah, and it’s pretty widespread throughout the South and South Midlands for sure.

Well, perfect. Yeah, I was a little uncertain what the modern connotation of that might mean, Grant, as you alluded to. I was a little hesitant to call in with it, so I’m glad that it is much more prosaic than that.

It’s prosaic indeed.

Yes, definitely.

Fantastic.

Well, thank you all so much for helping me unravel a longstanding family mystery.

Thank you, David. We really appreciate it.

Take care.

Great.

Thanks for your time.

Bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

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